Biography | Gloria Steinem — The Midtown Club She Entered Undercover for Show Magazine

The New York Playboy Club opened at 5 East 59th Street in December 1962.

In 1963 Gloria Steinem went in as a waitress in the club's Bunny costume.

She was there as a reporter for Show magazine.

The piece that followed is remembered as "A Bunny's Tale."

It described the pay, the costume rules, the medical exam, and the gap between the club's glamour and the work.

The assignment made her famous and then made her hard to assign.

Editors treated the Bunny as the story, not the reporting.

The building is still at this address, just off Fifth Avenue.

The club itself closed in 1986.

The structure has been emptied, sold, and stripped for a jewelry retailer and offices.

A visitor in 2026 will not find a key club.

Steinem had moved to New York in 1960 and was already writing freelance when the assignment arrived.

The undercover week did not invent her politics.

It did teach a national audience that the pretty job was still a job, with hours and a manager.

Later portraits of her are easier to license than any 1963 club-floor photograph.

The 1972 news-conference picture used here is nine years after the assignment.

It is her face from the years when the Bunny line was still used as a put-down.

The address is the fact.

The interior is gone.

Photo: Gloria Steinem at a Women's Action Alliance news conference, 12 January 1972, photograph by Warren K. Leffler, U.S. News & World Report Collection, Library of Congress, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The pin is the former club at 5 East 59th Street, not the 1972 news conference.